It would be easy to walk into a session on AI and expect the usual: a few charts, a lot of jargon, and a vague sense that someone somewhere is about to replace your job with an app.
But at the Worldwide Partners, Inc. Global Meeting in Chicago, something different happened. What unfolded on stage was a two-part conversation between Taryn Southern, an artist and technologist who rebuilt her life and creativity with AI, and Nilesh Ashra, a strategist and former coder whose skepticism and curiosity sparked a very different kind of call to action.
Together, they offered something agencies rarely get when it comes to AI: clarity, possibility, and—believe it or not—a bit of joy.
This wasn’t about how to replace teams with automation. It was about how to build better teams—human and machine—by shifting mindsets, rethinking creativity, and choosing courage over hesitation.
The Artist Who Lost Her Voice—And Found It in a Machine
Taryn Southern opened her session not with a slide, but with a story. In 2003, she stood on the American Idol stage, terrified. By her own admission, she froze. “I literally forgot every lyric,” she said. The experience gutted her confidence and sent her back to Kansas, swearing off music for good.
Fast forward fifteen years, and Southern released the first pop album composed with AI tools. “I had no musical training. No instrument skills. But AI gave me a way in,” she said. The irony wasn’t lost on her. The girl who froze in front of Simon Cowell was now creating orchestral tracks with algorithms. But more than the music, it was the process that changed her.
“It wasn’t just what I produced—it was how I started thinking differently.”
This theme—AI as a mirror and multiplier of human creativity—would become a throughline for her talk. Southern framed AI not as a shortcut to faster output, but as a catalyst for deeper creative flow. She shared how she built a creative bootcamp, developed entire marketing campaigns solo, even constructed an AI clone of herself that could speak in multiple languages. But the most powerful example came after a life-changing cancer diagnosis.
“I had already sequenced my genome. I had already experimented with AI tools. And when I was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer, I used AI to help me make sense of my own health data.”
Southern built tools to alert her of biomarker shifts. She created a GPT for young women with breast cancer. Her creative practice, once rooted in performance, had become one of resilience—and real-world utility.
The Strategist Who Asked: What Are We Even Doing With This?
Where Southern brought vulnerability and optimism, Nilesh Ashra brought provocation. The former Wieden+Kennedy creative technologist started by pointing to a simple truth:
“No consumer is asking for the future we keep promising.”
Ashra’s talk was a dense, layered monologue on the history and mechanics of AI—but made delightfully digestible. He didn’t waste time on AI’s ability to generate endless content or automate workflows. Instead, he focused on what it reveals about us: our tendency to race toward the familiar, to skip the creative idea and jump straight to distribution.
“Everyone wants to skip to the end,” he said. “To duplicate and distribute. But that’s not where value lives. It skips over the imagination.”
He pointed out that big players like WPP “haven’t invested $100 million in AI scientists—because those people already work at OpenAI and Google.” Holding companies, he argued, are busy “creating the illusion of a product or service” rather than building true technological advantage. “WPP will probably be fine,” he quipped. “They own the parking lots.”
But for independent agencies? The advantage is elsewhere: in bold ideas, cultural curiosity, and the willingness to experiment without waiting for permission.
He described generative AI as a “co-pilot for your imagination,” and repeatedly returned to the idea that indie agencies should care less about tools and more about curiosity. His advice? Push the boundaries. Explore emergent behaviors. Don’t Google for answers—poke around until something weird and wonderful happens.
Ashra demonstrated how he builds text-based simulations, visual strategy maps, and creative personas. He showed how AI can simulate an email inbox from a fictional character (yes, including Shiv Roy from Succession), create new archetypes, and spin out conceptual color palettes for imaginary kitchens. The point wasn’t to be quirky. The point was to provoke creativity in ways agencies have forgotten to do.
What Indie Agencies Can Learn from Both
If Southern represented the empathy and experimentation that AI can enable, Ashra stood in as a necessary skeptic—a reminder that agencies must ask better questions of the tools they’re now expected to use.
And yet, neither treated AI as a panacea.
Southern talked about the emotional lift of having a tool that doesn’t judge your half-formed ideas. “I had ideas I never would have pitched in a room. But I could pitch them to AI,” she said. Her process involved stacking tools, building GPTs trained on her own projects, and helping teams create “tool trackers” so creatives could stop drowning in apps and start building workflows.
Ashra, meanwhile, offered a caution about over-reliance on AI for execution alone. “If your value is tied only to production,” he warned, “you’re in a tough spot. But if you’re in the business of imagination? You’re golden.”
He suggested agencies reframe their internal development around generative AI literacy—not as a threat, but as a competitive advantage. “The barrier to entry is zero. It’s a question of who’s willing to push the buttons.”
So Where Do We Go From Here?
Start small. Start weird. Start now.
Both speakers emphasized that there is no “right way” to implement AI. Southern suggested setting up low-stakes lunchtime challenges to encourage creative play. Ashra advocated for collecting “prompt experiments” like Pokémon—testing edge cases, naming behaviors, building internal references.
Because, in the end, this isn’t about replacing jobs. It’s about making space for better thinking.
“The entire reflex of our industry is to arrive at the end of the process,” Ashra said. “But AI lets us reenter the middle. And maybe that’s where the magic is.”
Southern echoed this: “We’re not in a creative crisis because of AI. We’ve been in a creative crisis because of everything but AI. This could actually be the thing that brings us back to ourselves.”
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Doug Zanger is the founder and editor-in-chief of Indie Agency News. He is also the founder of the Creative Bohemian consultancy, lives in the Pacific Northwest and is insufferable about it.
